A Bowl of Fruit, a Whale in the Woods

by Russel Like

[from Amazon] Greg Fisher finds a pair of glasses in his apartment that, he discovers during a fit of existential boredom, allows him to travel through paintings to alternate realities. It stops being fun and games, though, after Greg jumps into a German expressionist painting and lands in a totalitarian world governed by Ceausescu, who rules by means of mind-control hats. Ceausescu's soldiers start taking over other worlds, including ours. Greg and an alternate-world researcher, a painter so afraid of cults that he has people fill out a questionnaire before he'll talk to them, a man who lives by finding change on the sidewalk, a woman prone to lightning strikes, and a biologist must save all the worlds affected by Ceausescu. Their successful strategy is brilliant, but it comes almost too late, for the mind-control devices have spread throughout most human-populated worlds and have followed Greg and company to a world on which giant squids compete over the best eggplant recipe. Full of spectacularly odd worlds; frantic, bumbling adventure; and triumphant world-saving. Regina Schroeder
Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved

Genres: Fantasy

258 pages, Paperback

First published September 5, 2000

Reviews

[Indianajackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quirky scifi